Raymond Aron - Politics and History

Like the rest of his generation, Aron was profoundly shaped by the experience of fascism and World War II, but his travails were intellectual and spiritual rather than physical. Son of well-to-do parents (his brother Adrien was able to pursue a life of bridge and tennis, to the unending envy of Raymond), Aron was never worried about money, even when he had none (at the end of the war he turned down a chair at the University of Toulouse, although no other job had been offered him). He saw the rise of national socialism in Germany first-hand, in the School of Philosophy of the University of Cologne, where he spent the years 1930-33. After a brief period in Le Havre, Aron returned to Paris in 1934 where, until the outbreak of the war, he became a professional observer of the political events of his time, a skill that subsequently became part of his ability to reconstruct historical events. Like so many outsiders, Aron strained to comprehend the principal causes of evil in the world:

Aron was trying to find a middle ground between German historicism (with its dictum to re-create the past as it really was) and French historiography (which generally insisted that the search for proper method preceded the reconstruction of events. This was particularly so in the case of writing histories of the French Revolution). He was also arguing for the ability to detach oneself from the passions of the present (saying explicitly that he would not deny the right of existence to contemporary history), an effort that would take up most of the second half of his life. This insistence on the integrity of factual reconstruction set him aside from most of his French contemporaries, for Aron demanded that analysis begin with evidence, not with theory. He recognized that every historical reconstruction entailed interpretationthe basis for the inclusion or exclusion of particular factsbut he believed it possible and indeed mandatory that the first step in historical analysis be the effort at scrupulous reconstruction of the world in which the events took place, so that one could understand the motivations of the principal actors.